New chair for 2degrees

[Update - Earthquake in Haiti affects shareholder] Trilogy International has tightened its grip on the country’s third mobile provider by increasing its shareholding and installing a senior executive as Chairman of the Board.

Bill Osborne is to step down from the role of 2degrees Chair next month to be replaced by the current vice chairman Stewart Sheriff (pictured). Sheriff is the senior vice president and chief technology officer for Trilogy International and is a resident of Scottsdale, Arizona.

Osborne was the Chair during the mobile provider’s previous incarnation New Zealand Communications and represents the interests of minority shareholder Hautaki Trust. The Trust previously owned around 20% of 2degrees, but in October 2009 the Chair Brian Leighs announced it had to raise additional $20 million to retain its share.

The Trust failed to raise sufficient funds, and their shareholding has been diluted.

2degrees spokesperson Bryony Hilless says the process of reassigning shares has yet to be completed but it’s understood the that Hautaki will lose around 7% of its shareholding, which will bring it to around 13%.

“And the other shareholders will increase their ownership – but as to exactly what those new percentages will be I won’t know until next week when the process has been completed,” she says.

Trilogy International Chairman John Stanton will be in Auckland next week and will speak at breakfast hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce. The topic of his talk is “How to Build Successful Companies in Competitive Markets”.

In December 2009, U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, presented the Award for Business Excellence to John Stanton, recognising Trilogy’s achievements in corporate responsibility. He is ranked in the Top 1000 richest Americans.

Meanwhile, members of Trilogy’s senior management are currently in Haiti following the massive 7.0 earthquake that struck the Caribbean country yesterday. Trilogy owns a wireless operation called Voilà, which has over a million subscribers. A report on the company’s website says it is working to ensure the network is fully restored, as mobile communication is critical in a country where traditional landline services are almost non-existent.

“Voilà’s network continued to operate for several hours through the aftershocks before we were forced to shut down the switch to maintain its integrity until our generators and cooling systems were back online. We have restarted our generators at the main switch and are in the process of bringing our network back up Once this has occurred, we will be focused on managed traffic and adding capacity as rapidly as possible to aid the humanitarian efforts in Haiti.”